This is one world No. 1 tag that 'emerging India' would love to shed. Indians comprised 58% of all people across the world who regularly defecated in the open in 2008. That's more than half the Indian population (54%), a WHO-UNICEF report said. While 18% of urban India indulged in the practice, the percentage was as high as 69% in rural parts of the country. Globally, 1.1 billion people still...

The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) today issued new guidelines for malaria treatment, marking the first time the agency has released guidance on procuring safe and effective medicines to treat the DISEase. The agency warned that if not used properly, artemisinin-based combination therapy, known as ACTs, which have transformed treatment in recent years, could become ineffective. “The world now has the means to rapidly diagnose malaria and treat it...

Biotech technicians neither have the knowledge of gene ecology nor the expertise in multiple disciplines.    After the minister of environment Jairam Ramesh announced a moratorium on Bt brinjal, article after article in the media has denounced the decision, saying such decisions should be left to ‘scientists.’ The issue is however not science vs anti-science. It is reductionist science vs systems science. The moratorium took into account the best of science. Many...

If climate change is indeed the biggest global health threat, public health professionals say that women and children in developing countries will be hit hardest. Research has shown that deep inequalities make them the most vulnerable to scarcity and DISEase when community sources start to shrink. “Malnutrition poses the biggest threat to children,” paediatrics professor Louis Reynolds said. “If temperature rises by 3 degrees centigrade, deaths from malnutrition will go up by...

 A major new United Nations study will examine the influence of climate change and some of the world’s most hazardous chemicals on human health and the environment. The 12-month study, announced by the Secretariat of the Stockholm Convention, will provide the scientific community and policymakers with a better understanding of the effects of climate change on emissions, environmental distribution, toxicity and exposure to what is known as persistent organic pollutants...